The South China Sea (41 page)

No-one knows the exact state of the tuna stocks in the South China Sea because the countries around its rim can't agree to cooperate on a proper investigation. In their eyes, allowing another state to jointly administer fish stocks carries the risk of bolstering a rival claim to sovereignty. In the meantime, the situation appears to be heading for catastrophe. The best estimates have been provided by the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center, an inter-governmental organisation created in 1967 to try to resolve exactly these kind of problems. They can only measure what's caught, not what's still in the sea. In 2001 fishermen in the region recorded a total tuna catch of 870,000 tons. By 2008 that figure had more than doubled to 1.9 million tons. This represented
about 14 per cent of all the fish caught in Southeast Asia.
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But by 2010 tuna were becoming harder to find and the catch had fallen to 1.6 million tons.

It's not just tuna: all species are under pressure. Some 500 million people live around the shores of the South China Sea and as rural people migrate to cities and become richer, their demand for fish is rocketing. As more fish are pulled out of the sea, it becomes harder to catch those that remain. In 1980 there were 584,000 fishing operators registered in the Philippines. By 2002 there were 1.8 million. Over the same period, the average catch of a small-scale inshore fisherman fell from 20 kilos to 2 – barely subsistence level.
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In China, as incomes rose between 1970 and 2010, the proportion of fish in the national diet quintupled to 25 kilos per person per year. As the country gets richer it will rise further: in Indonesia the figure is 35 kilos, in Taiwan it's 45 kilos and in Japan it's 65 kilos. Exacerbating the problem, China became a major fish exporter over the same period. Although 70 per cent of China's fish supply comes from aquaculture, the total sea catch quadrupled from 3 million tonnes in 1978 to 12 million tonnes in 1998 and remains at that level, according to official Chinese statistics.
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The steadiness with which the annual catch matches the declared target has led some experts to doubt the truth of the figures, particularly since a 2008 report by the State Oceanic Administration estimated the sustainable level of the catch at just 8 million tonnes. As the catch has increased, the stocks have decreased.

Zhang Hongzhou of the Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore has studied the development of the problem. He found that official attempts to reduce the size of the Chinese fishing fleet through legislation and compensation have failed. Not only are there now more boats than when the policy started in 1998, they are bigger and more powerful. As a result they are heading further and further out to sea. In 1988, 90 per cent of the Chinese industry fished inshore. By 2002 that had dropped to 64 per cent, with over a third of the fleet heading offshore. The trend has continued. By 2006, 60 per cent of the catch in Guangdong province was offshore. Overall, according to official statistics, the total catch landed in China has not increased – but the proportion of the catch obtained far from the Chinese mainland has tripled. As Chinese boats have fished further away from their home ports they have encountered other countries’ coastguards
and rival crews. Chinese media have documented thousands of cases of alleged harassment of Chinese fishing boats over the past two decades.
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The same is true for other countries’ fishing crews. Since 1999, in an effort to try to let fish stocks recover, China has imposed an annual ten-week fishing ban between May and August in the area north of the Spratly Islands (defined as beyond 12° N). While the ban itself may make sound conservation sense, its unilateral imposition has prevented other countries from joining it because they fear that acquiescence could be interpreted as recognition of Chinese sovereign rights. The result, each year, is an increasing number of clashes between fishermen from Vietnam and the Philippines sailing into the closed area and Chinese maritime authorities determined to enforce their regulations in the name of both sovereignty and spawning fish. The Chinese authorities loudly advertise the impact that their ban has on the home fishing fleet. In 2013, according to the official media, it affected around 9,000 boats registered in Hainan province and 14,000 in Guangdong province. Compensation was paid to those who lost incomes by staying in port but, of course, not to crews from other countries.
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The ban doesn't apply to Chinese boats with official licences to fish in the contested waters around the Spratlys, however. The message to them is clear – head off to the disputed areas, fly the flag and bring home the tuna. Subsidies are given to Chinese fishermen who upgrade their boats in order to travel the longer distances to the islands – the bigger the engine, the more they get – and boat owners get additional payments for every trip they make there.
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One report in the
Straits Times
newspaper from August 2012 described how Chinese officials visited the port of Tanmen on Hainan Island to encourage fishermen to voyage down to the Spratlys.
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During the 2012 ban, the Hainan Province Department of Ocean and Fisheries organised the largest-ever Chinese fishing fleet to reach the islands: 30 vessels including a 3,000-ton supply ship. Journalists were taken along just to make sure that the message reached the world. In 2013 another 30 ships were sent during the ban and the head of the Fisheries Office, Huang Wenhui, told
Xinhua
news agency that the ultimate aim was to ‘explore ways to exploit high-seas resources in a systematic manner’. Clashes over fishing around the Spratlys are the result of overfishing around the Chinese coast combined with a deliberate policy of developing new sources of supply.

The policy, however, ignores the obvious reality that other fishing fleets are already overfishing the Spratlys in order to feed their own growing populations. As long ago as 1994, researchers found it difficult to catch adult fish on some of the reefs off the Malaysian and Philippine coasts.
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Even where catches remain steady, the amount of effort to bring them in has increased. Between 1995 and 2005, fish stocks off Sabah collapsed by 70 per cent. The Gulf of Thailand provides a sobering warning of what may ensue. As early as 1990, after two decades of overfishing, crews were reporting that 85 per cent of what they were catching was ‘trash fish’. With no reliable income in their home waters Thai fishermen became known as the region's biggest trespassers, with thousands arrested each year while trying to make a living in other countries’ EEZs.
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The South China Sea is heading for a similar fate, threatening the food supplies of half a billion people. Macro-scale statistical models suggest the stocks of larger species fell by more than half between 1960 and 2000. Fish were once plentiful right across the Sea, except in the very deepest areas. Large areas are now commercially empty. The only part of the region where stocks remain in better condition is off Brunei – where the presence of so many oil rigs has prevented large-scale destructive fishing. What can be done? Can the disputes be resolved before it's too late to save the fish?

Professor John McManus has spent two decades studying the aquatic life of the region and is now Director of the National Center for Coral Reef Research at the University of Miami. McManus believes the contested islands play a vital role in keeping the whole South China Sea alive. Fish breed there and then ocean currents spread their larvae far around the region. ‘The coral reefs of the Spratly Islands have among the world's highest species diversities,’ he told me. ‘The surrounding coastlines are heavily over-exploited, and it's likely that local population collapses of certain species are being prevented by occasional influxes of larval fish from the Spratlys and other remote reefs in the Sea.’ For years McManus has argued that the Spratlys should be turned into a marine conservation park for the benefit of the whole region. By preserving what is, in effect, a giant fish nursery, a ‘peace park’ could provide the stock to allow fish populations elsewhere to recover, provided that fishing elsewhere becomes more sustainable.

There has been one attempt in the recent past to try to create something similar. In March 2001 all the South China Sea claimants agreed to put aside their differences and cooperate in a $32 million United Nations Environment Programme-led project on ‘Reversing Environmental Degradation Trends in the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand’. The project ran for six years from 2002 until 2008 and chalked up a number of successes. However, its final evaluation concluded ruefully that ‘in the end, there still was no success in getting China and Malaysia involved in issues that would involve multilateral agreements, notably in the case of trans-boundary fish stocks’.
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McManus confirms that. ‘The participation of the People's Republic of China ensured that the issue of the Spratly Islands would not be taken up officially in that project,’ he told me. The United Nations team found it almost impossible to develop projects involving more than one country at a time and none were undertaken in the disputed areas of the Sea. The planned objective – to create ‘refugia’ in the sea to protect sites where fish spawn and grow – came to nothing.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has voted in favour of the ‘peace park’ idea and, according to McManus, ‘many regional scientists and conservationists in all the claimant countries are very supportive, especially in the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam’. The problem lies at the official level. Only one of the claimants, the government in Taiwan, is officially in favour although President Ramos of the Philippines once gave it his backing too. ‘Most political leaders have been reluctant to open a dialogue on this with the PRC [People's Republic of China],’ laments McManus. ‘The potential for oil in the basin has also complicated the issue, although it is well known that oil is more abundant and much less expensive to access along the continental shelf areas of the South China Sea than within the deep waters amid the Spratly reefs.’ As a result, it's hard to be optimistic about the possibility of countries working together to prevent a total collapse of the South China Sea fisheries.

Fish stocks should, in theory, be easier to manage than oil and gas for two reasons: they are renewable and they move. It doesn't make sense for one country to try to manage migratory fish. All around the world, regional fisheries management organisations have been created so that countries can cooperate in overseeing the stocks upon which they all depend. In Southeast Asia the organisation with the best record of researching and
acting to protect the region's fish stocks is the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center. China could easily join, but it has chosen not to. Given its unwillingness to join similar regional initiatives in the past, it seems unlikely that it will do so in the future. Beijing isn't opposed to fisheries agreements in principle. It has concluded them with Japan in 1997, with South Korea in 2000 and with Vietnam, also in 2000. It held one round of talks in the ‘Philippines–China Joint Commission on Fisheries’ in 2005 but then no more.
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The sticking point is its refusal to deal with any issue in the South China Sea on a multilateral basis. The Vietnam deal only applies in the Gulf of Tonkin, an area of sea that was only disputed between those two countries. But tuna don't respect international boundaries, so bilateral arrangements are unlikely to solve the problem. All countries around the Sea depend upon cheap supplies of fish to feed their populations. In the absence of any agreement to safeguard the stocks, increasing short-term exploitation is putting all countries in the region at risk of a major food crisis. If China and its neighbours can't agree on basic steps to avoid the risk of starvation, how likely are they to reach agreement on the wider issues of sovereignty and territory?

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A lasting agreement on sovereignty and territory would answer many prayers around the region, not least in the Philippines. As Secretary-General of the Commission on Maritime and Ocean Affairs, Henry Bensurto is the brains behind the Philippines’ policy in the South China Sea disputes. His soft voice and dark eyes camouflage a steely resolution. The battles he has fought to persuade the Philippine establishment to bring the country's maritime claims into line with international law, and then to defend those claims at innumerable international workshops, have introduced grey flecks into his formerly jet-black hair. On the day we met they matched his forehead, streaked grey by the Catholic rite of Ash Wednesday. Bensurto has faith in international law too: he believes it can resurrect the chances of peace in the Sea. Under his guidance Manila has switched the basis of its territorial claim from the earlier premise that the Philippines inherited it from ‘Admiral’ Tomas Cloma who ‘discovered’ the islands (see Chapter 3) to one grounded in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
(UNCLOS). In 2009, he pushed for a new Philippine Baseline Law that ended the country's claim to Cloma's huge polygon of the ‘Kalayaan Island Group’ and brought it into line with UNCLOS. Then in 2011, Bensurto offered a new hope. He called it the Zone of Peace, Freedom, Friendship and Cooperation.

The essence of the zone is that claimants should first clarify which areas of the Sea are disputed and which are not and only then move on to resolving the disputes. The disputes come in two kinds. One set is ‘territorial disputes’ – the question of the legitimate ‘ownership’ of each land feature in the South China Sea. The other set is ‘maritime boundary disputes’ – what size ‘zones’ are generated by each feature under UNCLOS. If a tribunal rules that a particular island can sustain human habitation or economic life they would award it an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of up to 200 nautical miles radius; if they rule it is just a ‘rock’ that cannot sustain human or economic life then it would only generate a 12-nautical mile territorial sea and no EEZ; and if in its natural state it would be under water at high tide it generates no territorial sea or EEZ at all.